menubar

Monitor your system from the menu bar

iStat Menus is a comprehensive set of system monitoring tools, providing a quick-access view of system activity in your menu bar.

Formerly a free preference pane, iStat Menus is now a paid, standalone app--but it offers a lot of functionality to justify its price, along with a clean interface and very low system overhead. You need to open iStat Menus when you're configuring it, but most of the time you'll only see the app in an array of highly configurable menu-bar icons. iStat Menus can help you track CPU activity, memory usage, disk usage, disk activity, network activity, … Read more

Open-and-save convenience

Default Folder X is a system preference pane that can save you a lot of time finding and flipping through folders, especially when opening and saving files.

The primary interface pops up with every open and save dialog, across all your applications, giving you faster access to multiple folders and commands. You can jump to favorite and recently used folders (even by clicking on open windows), enter Spotlight metatags, and manage files and folders right from the dialog--so you don't need to go to the Finder for simple tasks like renaming and deleting.

Default Folder X also lets you &… Read more

Disappearing act

This add-on for Mozilla's Firefox Web browser has one task and one task only: it hides the Menu Toolbar on the Firefox interface. We're not quite sure why it's needed, but it performed as promised.

Installing Hide Menubar is like installing any Firefox add-on. Once it was installed, we had to restart our browser for the changes to take effect. As soon as our browser window reappeared, we noticed that our Menu Toolbar had indeed disappeared. To make it reappear, all we had to do was hit the Alt button on our keyboard. As soon as you … Read more

Versatile world clock

FoxClocks is an extension that allows users to add clocks in multiple time zones to Firefox, Thunderbird, and Sunbird. The program is easy to use and highly customizable, two characteristics that don't always show up together.

The program's interface is fairly intuitive, although users will find when they try to search for a specific location that the list is somewhat haphazardly organized. Fortunately, if you know what time zone you're looking for, you can customize the way the location displays. For example, we selected Central time in honor of a friend who just moved to Texas, but … Read more

Enhance your contextual menus

FinderPop is a free preference pane that extends the functionality of OS X's contextual menus, helping you more quickly browse, open, move, preview, and get info on folders, files, volumes, and apps using your mouse, in much the same way that other "launcher" apps increase efficiency with keyboard commands. This popular, venerable application has been around since Mac OS 9, and one of its main purposes is to emulate the old Apple Menu Items folder.

At its most basic, FinderPop lets you browse the contents of a folder or volume just by control-clicking on it, while also … Read more